


The Return of Faustina

by clearinghouse



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death Compliant, Gen, Post-Canon, Raffles Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9004150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clearinghouse/pseuds/clearinghouse
Summary: Having written the last of his stories about Raffles, Bunny decides he must try to forget his old friend and move on from the pain of loss. It is at this moment, however, that Bunny receives a surprising visitor, who reminds him that there are joys in remembrance.





	

**Author's Note:**

> First of two gifts for [shoreslip.tumblr.com](http://shoreslip.tumblr.com/) for the [rafflessecretsanta.tumblr.com](http://rafflessecretsanta.tumblr.com/) gift exchange. Happy Holidays, Shoreslip! 
> 
> Her request:
>
>> "The story I never got around to writing is my headcanon that Raffles lied about what happened with Faustina. They fled and lived together for a while but argued constantly, so Raffles eventually snuck off back to England. I'd love to read a story about Bunny running into Faustina after Raffles's death."

After I wrote my final Raffles novel—and it must be the final one—I was determined to forget all about my old friend at last. I should have liked to think of him now and then, and cherish the friendship he had showed me, but I was spending too much time in memories of him. It was time to move on with my life, to whatever little else remained to me, and, having broken my vow of silence for Garland’s sake, I was eager to say goodbye to Raffles and take up my old routines once more.

This I could never do again, however, from the moment that I met that beloved Italian lady of Raffles’s past acquaintance, the beautiful Faustina.

It was an especially congenial November morning that found me in the confines of my own flat—lacklustre rooms for sure, yet also with too much bric-a-brac that was meant to fill the space. I had opened the window at my desk so that I could enjoy the fine weather from my desk. Before the injury, I might have even gone outside for a stroll to feel the cool breeze as it pleasantly punctuated the warmth of the day. Instead, I wrote; it was my sole occupation, and at the same time it was the one pastime which an aged body and a disgraced reputation could not make the worse for me.

My rooms were lonely ones that morning, as they usually were. I must assert that I am fortunate to still have some friends who call upon me, though few are regular, and none are intimate. The dearest of them, a woman whom I shall never name in these writings, was the most recent such visitor, and that was some weeks ago.

The ring of the electric bell broke my midday reverie. So distracted was I, I had not heard the necessary footfalls along the steps which lead to it. I was not afraid of unexpected visits, however, especially as my honest work—and the parsimony which that kind of work engenders—afforded me an income steady enough to spare me from the hunt of creditors. Even if it were not the case that I had no known enemies, however, I was hardened in my middle age as I never was in the glory days of Raffles. I was not afraid of any mere stranger.

Shouting out that I would be only a moment to respond, I set aside my work and pulled on my coat. 

The woman who I met at the mat was taciturn, and dark in appearance. The woman was young, but not especially so. I immediately recognised her to be a foreign character, if only for the fact that she had come alone. She was dressed well, though somewhat too warmly for season, which suggested to me that she was not used to cold weather. She was tall, and wore her curly hair uncovered. Pressed eagerly between the two of her palms was one small book.

She seemed familiar to me; however, I did not know her. I offered her my name; she did not seem to recognise it.

I asked for her name in turn, after she had neglected to give it.

She did not answer that yet, for something about me had her too intrigued, and she had not heard me. “Bunny?” she asked me, with a pronounced Italian accent. 

I had not been called by such a name in ten years; my considerable shock did not equal my anger. For someone to enter into my rooms and throw that special relic of a name at my face was to demean me. I’ll own that I should not have been as incensed as I was; nevertheless, that a member of the reading public should first deign to read one of my Raffles books, and then presume to take on such familiar terms with me in person, was to confuse me for a literary character and to forget me altogether.

My sensitivity on this subject may be understood, if not excused, once the personal importance of the name which she had employed is made clear. My memories of that epithet, and of the feelings it espoused on those frequent occasions Raffles addressed had me with it, were valuable to me. Only he had referred to me as Bunny, and his Bunny at that. To cheapen that name was to cheapen that unbreakable bond with Raffles which—I am not ashamed to admit—survived in my heart.

“You’ve read my works?” I responded tersely. It was an unnecessary question, of course, for there was no other way for her to know that name. My object for speaking was not to know the answer, but to restore the appropriate distance between author and reader.

The woman presented her book to me. Only now did I read its title, which I know only too well, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman. A fond smile stretched across her features. “You wrote this book, yes?” she said, slowly, smiling. “You are the one who wrote of Arturo.”

Could she be referring to Raffles? Only once before had I heard of him being called in such an Italian fashion, long ago. It was impossible, however, that this woman should not prefer to call him by his English name, unless she meant to mock me further with her choice of words. The only souls who had referred in that other way to Raffles in life had made themselves victims to Raffles’s poison, excepting for that one poor creature who had so sadly lost her life in the caves of Italy. 

But here, I narrowed my eyes. Here stood a woman, a stranger to me, but of Italian origin, and with a symmetrical beauty to her, which surely must have been even greater to behold in her prime. For her to address my late friend so familiarly, could she be…? 

“Yes, I am Faustina,” she added with enthusiasm, clapping the book as she did so. It was plain that she thought she could read me to a certainty, and that she expected this declaration to clear all my confusion. 

On the contrary, the truth was as dark to me as ever.

I daresay I did not believe her. I remembered too well how Raffles had grieved inside of himself for his Faustina. With what great much emotion he had told me of the beginning and end of his Italian romance! The woman whom my visitor claimed to be was dead, I was sure. I would have her speak plainly to me or else leave me be.

“No, it is impossible that you are Faustina,” I said, my tone cold and hard.

But a gentler woman never graced the earth; she was not offended. Instead, she was anxious to prove herself true. “I am Faustina! I know you think me dead, sir,” her hand clapped the book again, “but Arturo did not tell you all. Stefano did not kill me. He used me as hostage. Raffles saved me from him. We fled together to Genoa. We tried to start a new life there.”

“What of his grief, then?” I demanded. “For that matter, what of his hair? Raffles lost the black of his hair, on account of stress he endured from Faustina’s death. It was all white when I saw him.”

“His white hair, did you say? I read what he said to you in your book, but it was a slow change. His hair was mostly black, yes, but did grow white while I knew him. He told me it was the swim that did it; he meant, I think, in some way, that it was natural.”

This rung truer to me than anything else she had said so far. At the time when Raffles had regaled me with his tale of Italy, I had not the awareness to contest so minor a detail as the rapidity of his change in hair colour. In hindsight, I did not see how a man’s full head of hair, blacker than even the dark shade of Faustina’s, could turn over into white as quickly as Raffles’s had done.

“Of his grief, it was not all a lie. We did love.” Her features took on an abstract air, which, together with her the darkness about her, could not fail to remind me of my old friend. “When we could not live as one, still, we did love.”

It occurred to me then why she had seemed so familiar to me at the onset; I suspected also why Raffles might have been drawn to her to begin with: it was on account of Faustina’s resemblance to his younger self. I decided not to mention this.

Slowly, I was beginning to believe her story. I asked her, “Why are you here?”

Her eyes, which had been so bright and eager, became at once moody and downcast. “Arturo was not happy in Genoa. I was not happy. We did argue. Sometimes, we did argue small things; but in truth I wanted to return home, for I missed my people, though Arturo thought little of them. I wanted a family, and children. His face turned at those words. He wanted instead to bring me to England. For that, he did teach me some little English, and for him, I tried to learn. But no. I could not. I wanted family, and I wanted for home. Genoa was too much for me; I was with Arturo, but we were alone; London could be no better. 

“Arturo arranged for my safe return home, out of his love for me. He was generous. I was with my family again, as a woman of property, and as a woman of more sense than I had before Genoa. I married. I have children. Though I love them all, my husband can never be just as my Arturo was to me.

“I wished to see Arturo one more time in my life. I searched for him in London. I did not find him. It was chance that I saw his English name in the newspaper. It was about your last book. I read the newspaper, and then I read the book. And then I read the other three books that you had written about him. Your home was not hard to find. I knew I must come to you to thank you. I will never see my beloved Arturo again, and I do miss him, but now I carry him with me. In your books, he is alive always, and close to me. Will you write more of him?”

When her speech had finished on this unexpectedly relevant note, I assured her that I would not write more of Raffles. I said so in a much sweeter tone than I was generally accustomed to using when answering that particular question, out of respect for her circumstances.

“Why did he want for England?” I said, more suddenly than I had intended, once the thought suggested itself to me. 

She smiled again. “Excuse me?”

I had always supposed that Raffles had left Italy on account of his heartbreak. If there had been no such heartbreak, however, then I could no longer understand why Raffles had abandoned his Italian home for London, the one place in the world where he could not show his face in public, and where his Italian enemies were most likely to hunt for him, and where his beautiful Faustina could not follow him. The mystery posed a new anxiety to me, for it seemed critical yet unsolvable, and I had of course realised that I could never hear the answer from the man himself.

I posed the question again to my visitor. “Why did he want to return to England? To London? There was nothing for him here.”

“He said that he must go,” she answered, in a way I found unhelpful.

I did not doubt that Raffles was capable of such sentimentality toward the land of his birth as Faustina had expressed about her own hometown. The British way of life, so familiar in its exacting and ordered design, is a far cry from the foreign passions of the continent. But this could not be enough of an explanation for me. What score of gold was there to be found here—what temptation could he have seen in this ruined sanctuary? I failed to see it, and so I pressed her for more; I did so in an irritable mood, and for that reason I was regretfully unkind. “But I ask you, why must he?”

“For his loyalty, to what was in England,” she said softly. She said nothing else on this point.

The author and friend inside of me protested altogether. That couldn’t be all there was to console me. It could not be loyalty to his country alone, patriotic though he was, especially at the end. Raffles’s story had been made incomplete; I could not understand him now as I thought I once did; his rebirth had no purpose. She had not really answered me; why did London call to Raffles? Why did he return to the land of his disgrace, and thereby make it possible for him to gather me up, and together with me to make such a go at an encore of the old times at the Albany?

I reflected that it would be hypocritical of me to follow this train of thought. I, for one, had elected to stay in the city in which I was the most ashamed. Yet there are differences between my old friend’s situation and mine. I am, at least, a free man here. Here resides my bored and excitable readership. The few connections that remain to me are only here in London. Unlike the Raffles of old, I have neither the wit nor the youth to diffuse myself into another culture as he had claimed to do so flawlessly in Italy. 

Perhaps he had only meant to escape from his insurmountable disagreements with Faustina with the action; but so much of my life had depended upon this single momentous choice of his. Why did he come back to me? What had driven him back to me? There was always my loyalty to him and his evils—that may have been what Faustina had actually heard him say—a loyalty so unerring that I would follow him to war for it. But I would never know for what reason he had decided that we should be together again. 

The beautiful woman stood where she was, waiting for an invitation into my rooms, so that we might speak further.

I did not honour the unspoken request. She should be able to see well enough that there was nothing more for her here. I wished most of all that she would not ask for it aloud. I had no wish to come to know her. I assured myself that she would not remain long, so that it must make no difference either way. 

“Thank you again, sir,” she said at last, forgiving me. “If you write more of him, then I am to be your first reader. If you will not write more of him, then I am to reread what you have written. I promise that I will know all that Arturo has said and done by heart.”

In any other context, this sort of commitment to my work would be high praise. Yet I could not find it in myself to thank her for that genuine fixation in her that I too speedily recognised. Unlike her, I had come to insist upon myself to linger no longer in the past. I still have some life left ahead of me, after all, even though it is a life largely confined to the exercise of my own imagination and my writing hand. (With respect to that body of work, I confess that Raffles was not wrong when he spoke of the limits of my creative faculties; however, from the writing of my memoirs, I have since adopted and put to the use the skill of twisting fact until it becomes fiction.)

I said farewell to her, and she to me. I closed the door behind her as she left—to escort her down would have been to only slow her considerably—and in my solitude afresh I began to wonder why Raffles should lie to me about Faustina.

But I would not make the same mistake twice; I stopped myself before I could think too much on this second question. This lie had not affected me or anyone else, except to protect the woman he had once called his Eve. 

Nor did I resent the deception as I expected to. On the contrary, I found it all laughable. In fact, Raffles must have thought himself honest to the last; it is likely that his own idealised image of Faustina did die after he at last won her in the cave, for nothing perfect exists, and the differences that would keep them apart must have soon started to come to light. The depth of his loyalty to what was in England not withstanding, his loyalty to her had begun to be weighed against other concerns. 

His loyalty, to what was in England…

I take refuge in self-deprecation when I confess to be as slow-witted as ever, for only then did it strike me, the extent of my ignorance. It was not loyalty to England of which Faustina had spoken. Neither was it that she had misheard him speak of my own loyalty to him. 

In speaking of it so softly, and so vaguely, she had meant so spare me, as Raffles had managed to do for ten years. But I had forced it from her, and now it was too late. The air around me stood still. Old emotions, some nearly forgotten, gripped me in a vice. A rare, exasperated sort of smile tugged at my lips. My love of Raffles came back to me, and I felt him again my heart, therein a part of me that I had meant to turn away from at last. I thought I was finally starting to bury him, to erase the pleasure of my memories of him, which were irrevocably entwined with the bitter pain of my loss. But Raffles was as alive and burning in me yet as I made him to be in the minds of my readers, and in the mind of Faustina. I could again hear his chromatic voice, and see his cynical smile, exactly as I had written of him and as clearly as if he were here beside me once more. And I did want to hear him, to see him, to keep him with me.

I may never again publish him, but I cannot try to make myself forget him again.

You will have guessed at my conclusion before I did: Raffles had lied about Faustina to keep me from learning that he had returned—for my sake. He had been too loyal to me to let me stand alone in a London which I, for him, had made my enemy; and he had cared too much for me to let me know that I was the reason he had left Italy for the land of danger.

I staggered out of my room, hobbling on my bad leg, to hurry through the hallway and out to the street, in order to catch the lady before she was gone, and invite her inside as I should have immediately done. For I had loved and still love Raffles, and he had loved me; and he had loved her, and she had loved him, too; for those reasons alone, I believed that I owed it to Raffles to show her kindness; but moreover, she too carried him with her, and knew as well as I did of the joy and the hurt that such a love brings. There was such a wealth of warm, brutal feeling in that shared knowledge of a dear, departed friend—and it demanded to be shared—which I had heretofore thought so lost to me.

I will not say that I expected anything to change afterwards. It would have been presumptuous of me to anticipate a close friendship to come of this encounter, or to think that my outlook on the past as well as the future would become ever brighter. I will only say that, for the first time in an age, I let someone I had almost lost forever back into my heart, while I let someone smiling and new into my rooms. 

End.


End file.
